Watermelon Power

Watermelon-automobiles
Next?

#fnbworld bureau/New Delhi

Millions of plump watermelons are left to
rot each year in the country. Now there's a way to
turn them into ethanol. With mid-summer nightmare
in progress, juicy watermelons are the perfect
coolers to quench thirst. But have you thought how
many watermelons are turned down for being
deformed or
disfigured?

Here lies
the secret power of such languishing watermelons.
The watermelons came to India around the fourth
century AD. Susruta, the great Indian physician
and surgeon, who wrote the Susruta Samhita,
mentions that watermelons were cultivated along
the banks of the Indus river. He calls the fruit
kalinda or kalinga (hence kalingad in
Marathi).

A very large number of
watermelon varieties are grown in India. They have
very exotic names like Noorjehani, Anarkali,
Sharbat-e-Anar, etc. Some varieties are named
after the towns near which they are grown in
Faizabadi, Jaunpuri and Farukhabadi - all of them
along the banks of the Ganga and the Yamuna. The
watermelon consists of 93% water. India imports
nearly 70% of its annual crude petroleum
requirement, which is nearly.110 million tons.

The prices are in the range of US$ 50-70 per
barrel, and the expenditure on crude purchase is
in the range of Rs.1,600 billion per year,
impacting in a big way, the country's foreign
exchange reserves. Ethanol production for
automobile from waste materials, not impacting on
food grains is thus a viable option for India in
subsidizing the high cost of import and production
of conventional fossil fuels.

Out of the 400 billion
pounds of watermelons grown each year in the US,
800 million pounds are rejected because they are
either blemished or deformed. Now there is a use
for all those rotting watermelons in the US and
likewise for India.

The Science
Daily reports that a 20 pound watermelon can
yield a 1.5 pounds of sugar, enough to produce
7/10 of a pound of ethanol. And a chemist Wayne
Fish has also shown that ethanol can be extracted
from the waste stream of watermelons used for
nutraceuticals (like lycopene a powerful
anti-oxident). This is good news for the
watermelon industry. Farmers gain an extra cash
crop and the nutraceutical industry which extracts
watermelon compounds, will have reduced expense on
waste water treatment.

Agricultural
Research Services (ARS) is perfecting a method for
extracting watermelon ethanol and developing an
intercroping method, whereby other ethanol crops
like sweet sorghum could be rotated with the
watermelon crop, providing a year-round source of
ethanol. Ethanol (ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol),
is a clear, colorless liquid with a
characteristic, agreeable odor. This is the
drinkable (though toxic) alcohol, the active
ingredient in beer, wine and spirits. Methanol
(methyl alcohol, wood alcohol) is much more
poisonous and isn't drinkable at all, it kills
people. Ethanol is also a high-performance motor
fuel that cuts poisonous exhaust emissions and is
better for the environment. Henry Ford designed
the famed Model T Ford to run on alcohol -- he
said it was "the fuel of the future".

The oil
companies thought otherwise, however -- but the
oil crisis of the early 1970s gave ethanol fuel a
new lease of life. The US leads the world in
ethanol production (ahead of Brazil), with 7
billion gallons of cleaner, ethanol-blended
gasoline used in 2007, about 12% of fuel sales in
the US.

Most of it is E85 (85%
ethanol 15% gasoline) or E10 (10% ethanol 90%
gasoline), which most gasoline cars can use
without engine conversion. Ethanol blends are
increasingly used in South Africa, while Brazil,
the world's ethanol fuel success story, produces
four billion gallons of ethanol a year. All
Brazilian fuel contains at least 24% ethanol, and
much of it is 100% ethanol!